RPS Asks: What Do you Want From Doom 4?

Share this:

So, if the (reportedly false) rumours are to be believed (update: and apparently they’re not. Hooray!), the future of Doom 4 might be in doubt. Which raises a question: what do we want from a fourth Doom game anyway? Should the next Doom game keep it old skool with a key-collecting run-and-gun? Or should it up updated to compete with the contemporary manshoots? Do we still want demons on Mars? And should it showcase the next generation of graphics, or do something new with the way shooters work? If you were in charge, what would you do?

Personally I quite like the idea of re-releasing a blow-by-blow remake the original game in an astonishing modern engine, with the only gameplay concessions to modern design being mouse-look and so on. Failing that, a single-button iPhone game, like Canabalt with cacodemons. (Not really. Likely.)

Problem is that Doom shouldn’t be a game with scaries, it should be a endless mob of monsters rushing at you in overwhelming numbers.
While I like games like Half Life that can make me jump, it isn’t what I wanted from a Doom game. Doom 3 was one of the bigger disappoints for me at that time because of that.

The worst thing in Doom3 was that it wasn’t thriller-scary with awesome battles with rock music in background. It was nothing, but prank-flash-screamer festival like in modern horror movies. It was annoying and tiring.
The most stupid thing, when you know that enemies will spawn behind you. You examine area, and when trying to advance – literately wall you were examining opens with a monster inside. How stupid is that? Why architect of this space station built that compartment, why is it hidden. How did mutant get into that, why he wasn’t making any noises while inside, why the heck wall just opened when I was about to leave. Bad level designing, bad!
Doom3 looked nice, although it was so dark, that you had to pull up brightness/gamma to see shit and thus made game grey and not so amusing to the eyes (same with Metro 2033)

All joking aside I would hope they instead move towards a cartoon (Pixar) look or Borderlands style which would suit the look of Doom 1 being bright and colourful and having a lot of enemies on screen.

No hyper realistic graphics, they’re ridiculously expensive to generate, takes too long to make them and generally cause all sorts of trouble – the more complex graphically games get the more unstable they seem to be on the PC.

I also don’t like endless continuations (ok. 4 is not endless). With every new part of a series developers/publishers do more damage. Especially from the publishers point of view it’s convenient and efficient to make sequels until the well runs dry, but it’s not the way to win fans clients in my opinion.

What I want is a new, meaningful, interesting game developed by a group of enthusiasts. What I don’t want is a game that desperately tries to be Doom, but really isn’t.

Adding to the sentiments above, it needs all the things that modern shooters fail to have.

-Environment variety that is spacially focused, not detail focused.
-Weapon mechanics variety, with no mechanics limitations (no deteriorating aim, no reloads, no kickback, no ironsights)
-Enemy variety that is power based rather than AI based. Homing shots, or flying shots produce emergent gameplay between enemies, but bots hopping left and right like a carnival game DO NOT.
-Slow, powerful enemies produce more complex gameplay than fast, weak ones.
-Instant reaction to player commands, with no acceleration concepts anywhere.
-The ‘real’ difficulty level needs to have strict ammo control. Meaning, take the average game, where a game reviewer will say ‘there’s not enough ammo,’ and then additionally reduce the ammo count by 80%. Instead of 50 shotgun shells, you get 10. Instead of 200 bullets, you get 40.
-Large enemy counts, most fights should be 3-5 enemies at once, large fights should be 50+ at once.
-No separate weapon buttons, like grenades. All weapons get their own slots.
-No plot, no talking, no characters, no inventory, no cutscenes. Fetching keys is perfectly acceptable, since nothing more complex than key fetching has ever existed in any fps, anyway.
-High player speed, about 10x faster than modern shooters. No run button.
-Health bar. Nothing regenerates. Health packs are used instantly on pickup, and don’t replenish health quickly.

Agreed. I’ve had enough Doom. It was great when it was new, then things came along that did what I liked better.

By the time Doom 3 came around, the only way I could have fun with it was in co-op, because it was so markedly different from Doom in its basic conceit and yet tried to be like it in many ways. It wanted teleporting enemies and monster closets, it wanted to be scary and photorealistic, it wanted System Shock 2-style audio logs to build a backstory, it wanted a serious plot and cutscenes, it wanted players to feel vulnerable and frightened in the dark. It fell between multiple stools, when if it had stuck to one or two it would have been much better. The same sort of mistakes were made with Quake IV, although less so. I’ve not played Rage yet, but I imagine I’ll eventually play it wanting it to either be Fallout 4 or a pure shooter. I can’t see Doom 4 doing any better.

Doom 3 was an OK game, with nice graphics, albeit too much repetitive (find stuff, walk over stuff, wall blows and monster drops) and too dark to contrast with the dynamic lighting. The biggest problem was Doom 3 wasn’t a Doom game; it was something else, more like a type of Resident Evil.

I want a fully integrated on-line social media service, with masses of stat tracking and it BETTER link up with facebook and Origin. If it doesn’t have any kill streaks I will NOT be buying.

Well… I loved the originals and if I actually wanted to keep playing them there are countless maps available to download all over the place… I quite liked Doom 3 although it got a bit boring. If someone could somehow alchemically condense the things that made Doom and the Half-Life series brilliant and then combine them I’d actually be quite happy.

I’d love to roam around huge starbases filled with demonic beasts, without scripted encounters.
And yes, I’d love to have the colored keys back, it’s not like modern games have much different ways to backtrack you a bit, sci-fi shooters are filled with stuff like “the energy power went out, find a whatever cell and plug it into the whatever maintenance system to lift the doors”. Just give me the damn colored keys then and make the whole game more arcade.

Also no cutscenes or dialogues please, I just want shooting in big maps full of monsters, good level design, trapsambush zones, no auto-regen life, and maybe some puzzles scattered around.

Oh and I almost forgot one of the most important things: An awesome hard rock/metal soundtrack playing during the whole game

Except that Rage does not have one of the most important aspects of the original DooMs:
HORDES upon HORDES of monsters. Rage has 3-4 monsters in the average encounter, while DooM II had sometimes 50 or more.

But, that’s very unlikely to happen. I haven’t played RAGE, but my sense was that it was trying to be a bridge between PC shooters and Console shooters… and if it’s sales have failed on consoles then I’m not sure where Bethesda/Id will go from here. They might go back to PC style, they might go full on CoD console style, or they might focus on engines and let others make the game.
The 3rd might be the best option.

TBH, I’m not sure that Doom4 is a winner. Times have changed, and it’s probably not the big IP that it once was. Especially on consoles. Make it too oldschool and we risk the old “it’s a great engine but it’s just the same game” complaints… make it too newschool and any old doom fans are going to dislike it.

I think going for a new IP in Rage was the right idea… even if it didn’t pan out.

If they make Doom4 now, I think it needs to have HUGE spaces, otherworldly architecture, hundreds of enemies on screen, non-linear maps, and slow moving projectiles.
BUT, it doesn’t need to be intentionally dumb (we have serious sam for that). It needs some of the cool AI and movement from RAGE, but also with advanced physics and tactical AI. and a cool (original!) story.

I actually think a lot of the RAGE tech (if it worked) would make cool Doom-style levels… just needs more open-ness and more color.
—-
If they decide to do something different (which I think they should) then they should go nuts. Procedurally generated hellscapes. Drop-in drop-out co-op with up to 100 players, and the number of enemies scales to fit.

Burning city park would be ok… but a little close to Serious Sam’s open flat arenas. I want chasms and ramparts and seas of blood and rising and falling buildings and all the other stuff that doom had (at least in my mind).

What I mean to say is, scale was important to doom (and SS captured the scale well). But level design was also important – and I’d want more now, like AI.

With the latest AMD preview drivers 11.10 Preview 2 it runs like a dream on my HD5870.
The only bug I still have is that cloth flags flicker black (and nothing else, no texture pop, no texture bugs, nothing).
Framerate is terrific though, steady as a rock at 60 FPS (thanks to v-sync, tearing was terrible) with my GPU barely even heating up compared to normal DirectX 11 games. Fans stay near idle.

Detail is turned up as high as it’ll go through a config-file (along with 8x FSAA and 16x AF) and the game looks great even though the large-scale texture detail is still terrible compared to the characters and vehicles. Hopefully the new patch will compensate a bit with the bicubic interpolation options.

I’m running a mobile part (6990M to be exact) and while the desktop preview packs will install, and everything D3D plays fine, attempting to launch any OpenGL game (not just RAGE, even my OpenGL Doom 1 source-port does the same) makes the entire display driver crash, resulting in a hard-locked application. The only recourse is to copy the OpenGL .dll file out of the older BF3 preview betas, then it works but the framerate is all over the shop. Even the recently released v3 previews don’t help. I can only hope the official WHQL version supposedly coming out at the end of the month fix things, as I can’t help feeling that Dell won’t get around to an official driver till around the launch of RAGE 2.

Hard Reset was decent at best for me. When it was announced I couldn’t wait for the game to come out, but after giving it a try it couldn’t hold my attention for a long time.

I think it was both a combination of boring weapons and boring enemies. The environment was one of its really good points, really rich in detail and memorable. Maybe too many explosive canisters. Still, better than damn crates!

Doom 4 in my mind should look almost exactly like this:
But with modern graphics, more monster types and a bunch of new guns.

Doom is still an amazingly compelling gameplay framework, and modern engine updates and mods have only made it better. There IS room there for a direct sequel, even in the modern day. Serious Sam 3 is proof that there’s a market still for straightforward shooters, and, in all honesty, I think Doom 2 still has far more weight and ‘power’ behind its combat than Serious Sam.

Edit: Oh yeah, the above is Doom with jumping, crouching, mouselook, altfires, reloading, and even a little regenerating health. It also works great, as the core framework supports them very nicely.

Prime, Zpack is just the set of levels. Brutal Doom plays ball with pretty much any map pack, so long as it doesn’t change gameplay, add weapons etc. You’ll also need the latest SVN build of GZDoom.
Have fun. It’s amazing how much love Doom still gets in the form of modifications.

Whenever someone says something dumb like ‘Doom was good for its time, but shooters have moved on. Nobody wants a game like that anymore’, I link them that video. I’m fairly sure it leads to the vast majority of them just installing the game straight away.

The health regen in Brutal Doom is actually pretty clever. If you’re VERY badly damaged, it rechages up to about 30% (maybe one imp fireball worth of damage), so you can actually have a fighting chance to get out of a tough situation. You also regenerate health up to that level but at a much faster rate while chainsawing enemies, so you can tear your way out of trouble, too.

If you have a berserk pack, you can perform Mortal Kombat-esque finishing moves on enemies, which heals you for a chunk of health roughly based on the enemy toughness. A zombie will give you 5hp, an imp, 10, a demon, 15, to 50 or so for finishing off a Baron of Hell that way.

As for the level, that’s one of the shortest, simplest levels in the ZPack, but it’s packed to the gills with ‘popcorn’ enemies that make for good gameplay footage.

huge sprawling openended levels (not in the style of serious sam which just has big room next to big room in a very linear “corridor”), double digit enemies to fight at once and possibly triple digits enemies on screen at once in open areas. no hitscan enemies, all projectile and being able to physically dodge enemy attacks, or required to think tactically in how you fight different enemies. I guess “mental” or magic attacks are ok to be almost instant when you see an enemy and he sees you, like with the original archvile. really fast player movement speed, all projectile player weapons. even pistols or machine guns should be projectile and not hitscan. obviously there should be a map editor, or the game should be able to be modded to have one. and mods of course.

I don’t think id would be able to make a good doom game like this though.

and also I don’t buy games on steam or steamworks games, so bethesda would have to change their direction there for me to even consider buying the game. hehe.

I think I would like for the Doom to remain a fond memory and a landmark in gaming history rather than being dragged out and reheated once again. I would quite like for game developers to stop trying to recreate past glories and come up with something as creative and different in comparison to todays generation of games as Doom was to its.

Serious Sam combat largely involves running backwards with your finger glued to the mouse button. Even the upcoming Serious Sam RPG has all the combat play out while the characters are running backwards.

Doom is far more up-close and aggressive, due to enemies in general being slower than the player, but able to do crippling damage in just a couple of its. Dodging around danger instead of trying to outpace it was order of the day.

I completely agree on the weaker enemies thing. Generally speaking having to shoot something 40 times before it dies isn’t a whole lot more “difficult” than shooting it once in the face, just more tedious. More than one FPS I’ve played has been ruined for me by overly tough enemies and the resulting constant need for ammo scavenging.

-Fast gameplay
-Interesting movement (strafe-jumping will do)
-Run well on low-end hardware at low settings
-Don’t fuck up the controls (e.g. mouse lag, etc.)
-Configurable (let us use the console to fiddle with whatever we want)

Can I just say I just played doom3 again this week before playing rage and I think its still a great game, it only starts to drag on a bit towards the end but it makes shooting things REALLY FUN.

When I picked up rage I could feel the improvements immediately in the gameplay and its running on my system with all the settings maxed at 60fps with np at all and it is mind numbingly gorgeous to behold. I can only ask for more of the same from id tbqh.

As for bethesda hamstringing id, it sounds very unlikely and if it’s over buggy initial releases, well bethesda are the worst in the industry for that, so it seems like id fit right in. plus rage is making good in the all formats chart, it came out right in the sweet spot before the big big releases.

They should just take DOOM 2 and rake it up to fucking eleven. Insane graphics, humongous maps, fast paced as hell, coop with a shitload of players, more different enemies and weapons than you can imagine, spells, inventory system that lets you carry 40 fucking guns, grenades, spells, powerups, armour, skills, experience points, a random map generator gametype similar to roguelike games, and GORE.

See this DOOM 2 mod for inspiration: link to youtube.com
Playing that you find a new enemy and weapon in every damn room you encounter…

The trouble with most modern games is that they pretend to be more than games when they are really shooters.

DOOM was a shooter. You picked something up, suddenly the ceiling lowered and out came demons and stuff went down. You found secrets, you made the environment evolve with your exploration, you battled arenas, you ran gauntlets, you had monsters fighting amonst themselves..and nobody cared whether there was a freedom faction or some kind of proper plot or exposition etc.

THAT is what I would like to see again. A game where the main question isn’t “But can we make it do 4 player co-op?” but “How can we make this fun and awesome with the constant feel of adrenaline, while remaining simple and straight-forward” (i.e. Don’t go overboard and become Serious Sam or DNF by going too simple or too extreme in wanting too much).

Just make an enjoyable run-and-gun experience that has both challenges, exploration and rewards, without trapping you with silly stuff (such as gun limits or 9000 seperate cutscenes etc).

Oh, and one other thing. DOOM got a kind of RPG touch to it. It got gun progression right. It didn’t flush you with it. It leveld up enemies and guns gradually, and when you got the chaingun or shotgun the first time, you were ACTUALLY having a moment of revelation and awesomeness.

This is what so much stuff lacks. Pacing, leveling, exploration etc, in a well-timed fashion and a sense of fun and progress.

Rage has brilliantly fun gameplay. If they tossed in the large, sprawling levels of Doom of old, set them in nonsense locations that have no bearing on reality, so they can do whatever. Yes, please.
Remove health regeneration. The defibrilator was a great idea, but it’s watered out by the regeneration ability.

I really am in love with how Rage has all the oldschool type gameplay and enemies, but it infuriates me that they’re not used to better effect, that there are not more of them at the same time, that I have to talk to guys and drive around doing nothing. I want to SHOOT monsters, and I want them to absorb a full clip of ammo, I want to see blood and gore and impressive animations like Rage does so well. But I don’t want to blather on in a nonsensical story in a nonsense world.
Give me an exposition at the start and a pretty intromovie, that I can skip the next time I play, and then give me level after level after level of killing inventive enemies in impressive, crazy environments. Moonbases, evil strongholds in hell, all kinds of things.

Doom 2 had terrible, TERRIBLE level design. The sprawling city-wide keyhunts are about the least fun thing in the game. Most good fan-made Doom levels reduce the key-hunting and backtracking in favor of more coherent pacing.

Doom was great, but that isn’t to say the design can’t be (and has been) improved on.

Doom 2 had excellent level design. Getting to know the level and seeing things more than once was part of the experience. There aren’t many instances of running back and forth in the entire game. And hey, there’s plenty of monster closets to make sure that you don’t get bored.

After carmack has pretty much turned his back on PC gaming, and the bomb that was rage, I’d rather doom just stays as a great old series with one not so great reboot. And after Duke Nukem forever, Diablo 3, Human Revolution, Fallout 3/New vegas, Serious Sam 3, And X-COM, I think its fairly obvious that when a developer starts on a reboot of a beloved, old series that they don’t care about what made the game so good, they care about taking advantage of those that will buy it because of the name, and those that will buy it because of how they’ve bastardized it.

Give us left4dead but with Doom, with key cards (could force the group to split up!). The AI director from valve is brilliant and changes each game every time you play, add that plus plenty of monsters Serious Sam style with some awesome boss battles (the spider demon is still the greatest of all bosses). Make us survive the monsters, before we start to dominate them….then throw an even bigger harder beast at us

-Take Rage’s great combat
-Make it hard, this time. And without fucking health regen. Rage in nightmare was eaaasy.
-with the variety of monsters of Doom.
-A strong focus in full 4 coop.
-Don’t bring down the pace with quests, talking npcs, etc, but make a deep upgrade system for your weapons and gadgets, so there is a feeling of progression.

1. Fast-paced gameplay and character movement.
2. Big, explorable maps.
3. Proper ballistics ie not “hitscan” damage.
4. Medikits.
5. Many weapons and many different enemies.
6. An engine that can support a large number of enemies on screen.

DoomRL is a roguelike that borrows heavily from Doom, and adds some light RPG mechanics in the form of special skills you can choose as you level up (like in the Fallout games) and the ability to customize weapons with weapon mods. Basically, you’re The Doomguy no matter what, but you could be a dual-pistol wielding gunslinger, a shotgun wielding Terminator type who walks slowly and soaks up damage, a speedy berserker who specializes in chainsawing demons in half, a calm and thoughtful engineer who sets up ambushes, and many other possible character builds. I see it as Serious Sam with customizable traits borrowed from TF2… but with text instead of proper pixel graphics.

– Hellspawn on Earth
– Squad-based combat at certain intervals but not a Marine – just an everyman.
– RPG/Diablo style gun progression
– Left 4 Dead style Co-op.
– Complex dismemberment on the demons so you can see the effects of the various weapons.
– Random generation of demons, sort of like in Left 4 Dead with the zombies, so you’re not fighting identikits.
– No bladdy corridors and grey interiors.
– Crysis 2’s destroyed city environments are inspiring – could be used, imagine Hell seeping up through the city.

The only worthwhile choice would be to remake Doom (and Doom2) in a modern engine. Release at a budget price. Doesn’t have to be bleeding edge – there are plenty of good, stable engines out there.

I don’t think there is any real point in making a *new* Doom game.
They’d have 2 choices for direction.
1) Retread old ground – in which case, why bother making a new game at all? Just remake the old games with a new engine.
2) Move off in a new direction – in which case why bother making it a Doom game? Create a new IP without restricting your design choices by trying to fit in with the existing Doom framework.